Most websites glossed over this, but we didn't. Silverlight, once touted as Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash, has been retooled from its original purpose. Microsoft is betting big on HTML5 instead, turning Silverlight into the development platform for Windows Phone, and that's it. So... Silverlight is dead - long live Silerlight?

If Microsoft were to simply make the restricted parts unrestricted, and able to be implemented by any party for any platform without costs as is the case for XAML, or the C# language or CLI (or indeed as is the case for the competition, HTML5/WebM/CSS3/Javascript/Canvas/SVG), then there would be no issue, and Silverlight would be wholly acceptable and could have become widely implemented and widely used.

I don't think the restricted portions are restricted at all. Simply write a decoder for your favorite open codec, and your problems are solved. They are bridges you'll need to cross with HTML5 anyway, so the pain is unavoidable.

The web is just a tangled mess of garbage, slow progress, and backwards programming models. Silverlight on the Web(specifically as a Flash competitor) was not killed by a lack of openness, it was killed by the stupidity of Microsoft. Silverlight on the Desktop (Full trust OOB) and as a WP7 dev platform, is alive and kicking.

The web needs a massive redesign. It will be on the shoulders of a sweeping, pragmatic, and breaking change. It won't be piecemeal or in any iteration of HTML/CSS/JS. I had hoped Silverlight would be it, but as Silverlight's ex Product Manager put it, Microsoft has a shiny object syndrome, in which it changes focus really rapidly.